maybe you let it happen because hearing the words
i love you
had more of a lasting effect on you than almost any other means
of self abuse you had tried to drown yourself in throughout your lifetime

maybe you let it happen because you liked being able
to escape
from all of the cacophony that had been
bumbling around in your head for weeks, months, years

maybe you let it happen because you were trying to forget
something
someone once told you while they were drunk and indifferent
sitting next to you at a bar, the kind of thing someone mumbles to you
right before they fall asleep and you're the only one who can recite it
word for word as if to savour the sting the next morning,
something you feel guilty for even remembering at all.

maybe you let it happen because you knew
that all of the terrible things that had been done to you
could never be proven, scientifically or otherwise
because you knew from an early age that
words were meaningless and you'd been living so long
inside the jaded surface of their hollow shell you needed
something tangible something or someone who would
scoop you up and eat you like ice cream
even if they only did it for the sake of their own
shameless unadulterated selfish enjoyment regardless
of the devastating consequences.

maybe you let it happen because you had been left
so many times you figured the words
i love you
were better than death itself
even if you knew those words were not real
even if the person who said them really never meant them
even if you never had the chance to discover
what that statement truly means
at all

but you would keep searching for it anyway
even if you kept finding it
in the wrong places
time and time again.

i need you to call me on the phone and beg me
not to hang up
i need you to tell me you're sorry, not for all the horrible things you've done,
but for not being there when you should have been.
i know it's not all your fault, i know you're a sick woman,
but i belong to you.
i will always belong to you.

i need you to sit down with me and hold my hand and cry with me
and tell me about your past lovers and why they left you
i need you to tell me about your first kiss
i need you to tell me that being a woman is terrifying, yet empowering
and list the reasons why.
i need you to set an example.

i need you to tell me you'd do anything for me,
i need you to acknowledge that you are a liar and that
the words you use with me are almost always
meaningless.

sometimes i fantasize about one day
typing out all of the sad and angry and vicious and painful poems
i've written about you, ripping them from my
typewriter, sticking them in a tightly sealed enveloped
and leaving them in your mailbox with a note on the front that says:
"here is all that i couldn't say. goodbye."
and then getting on a plane to nowhere, anywhere
and never coming back.

i need you to be someone you are not, and perhaps
never were
maybe that's why i cling so tightly
to those pictures of you when you were 21,
because you look so
happy, beautiful, magnetic.
you look like how i'd like to remember you,
how i'd like to know you.
we were all someone different once.

i need you and i know
it's an inconvenience and for that,
i am sorry.

at least i have the photographs.

lonely people do lonely things
they make homes out of
empty theatres
while they hold
an invisible hand that belongs to
an invisible body that sits
in the seat next to them.

lonely people have lonely habits
they roam the corridors of empty malls,
finding themselves seeing
an entirely different person
in each reflective surface they pass.

lonely people hide in lonely spaces
like the bottom of an empty wine bottle,
or the inside of an out of tune grand piano,
gnawing on the strings and getting them caught
between each bone of the ribcage waiting
for someone to come along
and pluck them just so they can
call it music.

lonely people fall in love with lonely things,
like the inconsistency of the moon
and the overwhelming light of the sun,
getting caught between which one is better to be
in love with,
over which one will keep
the loneliest heart of all
the most
safe.

the sky is keening
grief is heavy
and clings to me
i am humid and slow

my mother kisses me and there is desperation in her movements

i come up to the precipice
and cry a hymn
throwing it
against the vaster loneliness
that is pushing
its fingers
through my mouth


-


i bit
a hole in my
own skin

the walls and land
pilfer what leaks out

i cannot touch anything
for fear it will drag
too much from my body

at least

i will never forget
how i have travelled


-


i turn in the sunlight
blinded
arched against the warmth
joy glints sharp
draws as much blood
i am waiting
i am kept dull
barely open
the brush of a sound
will tear me from here

kurukshetra grey
but iridescent with the glory of all dreams combined
some omphalos of lusciousness still pumps
an umbilicus of sates
to broadening skies,
parhelion whims

what am i about
giving you no gifts
unable to pin
my finger on a theme
phenomenal you
with whom i play away the year,
yearned love from a decade's dream
you've swayed into the real
to flesh it here and interrupt all Being
with a node of savvy personality
i lessen if i think my words can measure
that, how you emerge there, change
come across the shore of presence, waves of filtered seas
deeply you have gone and risen from within
expanding metaphor in a lambency of ageless gazing at the stars
and giving all a joyful undercurrent swim.

luffa vines abound, for future shiny backskins arching bliss--
shedding all, i snake my way around the roots--
the yellow sheen fades and pupils zero intimate
a finer lived experience... ripe intrusion truly love in tune with
tips of sneezing hearts, curling toes unite, shout
an intertwining pelvic orbit vaster space to yet unmake
unspoken pleasures wide in everpresent fontanels
the spectra plenum here again, next breath, ends of in, ends of out